Using AI Generated Code Will Make You a Bad Programmer(slopwatch.com) |
Using AI Generated Code Will Make You a Bad Programmer(slopwatch.com) |
There have been many new tools. The simplistic DWIM AI coding assistant on my Lisp Machine seemed like magic 40 years ago and perhaps LLMs seem a little magical now.
However they are just tools to get work done faster. I love coding with assistance from Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT.
I don't even want to know where Next leaves off and React begins, or even where React leaves off and TypeScript begins, or even if I'm using TypeScript or JavaScript. Let AIs handle the miasma that is front-end development. I'll paste it in there, test it, make it as succinct as possible and get it off my plate so I can do something more useful.
This compared to the time I used AI to help with my first Ruby project, where it pointed me to some cool libraries, pushed me to look up amazing functionalities that my PHP-corrupted brain couldn't even conceive of, etc.
AI is much less likely to help you engineer your way out of miasma.
When you automate something, you get more of it. Except attention, you get less of that.
I know developers that fret over younger devs that have never even seen assemby and thus do not understand the code they write and so on….
Learn how to use AI to be better and faster than everyone else.
No one in a decade will pay top dollar for a slow dev that knows their handwritten code indside out.
Its all about scale and speed. Now you can argue that it takes the artisanship out of development but truth is, no one cares.
Learn how to use AI to get faster and learn how to teach the AI to be better and more accurate.
They are not coming for the tech jobs, they are already here. Just get on top of them and youll survive.
But they will have to pay for the dev that can debug years of code that their fleet of prompt engineers cant figure out.
> Its all about scale and speed. Now you can argue that it takes the artisanship out of development but truth is, no one cares.
I think you're correct, the MBAs making decisions won't care, and will choose scale and speed. And so will the AI driven developers, but the actual engineers will care.
> They are not coming for the tech jobs, they are already here. Just get on top of them and youll survive.
I'm not trying to survive, and neither are any of the engineers I respect. We're all well aware of the limitations of AI, and we know it's not coming for our jobs, (not yet anyways... I guess I should give it another quality revolution or so.) We're still preoccupied with trying to thrive. AI isn't a threat to us, but it is a threat to the next generation. It's near impossible to evolve, learn, grow, and adapt if you delegate all the thinking, and understanding about the multiple layers of the system you're working on to the GenAI robit your company is paying for; (instead of paying you that money)
won't that lead to aircrafts coming apart in flight, spaceships getting grounded and satellites exploding?
Not really. When I'm doing something new to me, I do not let AI write that code, otherwise how can I evaluate the code that it produces?
Skills You Already Have May Atrophy
Of course they will! Just like they do when you use a library of routines. Nobody writes merge sort outside of their algorithms class. Could I sit down right now and write merge sort? No. Do I care? Not really. Would I let AI write it for me? No - see above: I don't let AI write code I'm not familiar with. I'd prefer to use a library routine and move on. Failing that, I'm going to have to re-implement merge sort. The upshot is since I've implemented before, it'll all come back to me, and I can quickly write it again.
Afterward, I might even let AI take a crack at it and compare its code to my code. I'll use whichever one is best.
You May Become Dependent on Your Own Eventual Replacement
People said that about Intellisense, too. People said that about Code Wizards. I remember when MFC was first released in the early 1990s and with one click of a mouse button it could create a Windows Hello World! program. I remember spending days going through Petzold's book learning how to write a basic Windows program. Now all I have to do is click a button!
On a side note - when is the last time you ever bothered yourself with a windows message pump? Processor caching and branch prediction optimization? How about loop unrolling optimizations? There are times when such knowledge is needed, but I'd wager 90+% of today's programmers have never implemented such things outside of the classroom: if they even did that! And they're not using AI.
Your Code Will Not Be Respected
Are you saying AI-generated code can't pass the Turing test? That's - interesting. You talk about solutions, but in my mind, coding isn't solutioning. That's what architecture and design is for. Coding is implementation. That's why coding is referred to as a craft.
Can AI get good at the craft of coding? That's a question of automation and to answer that question I'll point out there aren't too many black smiths or white smiths around today. Or weavers, for that matter. These are all trades requiring a high degree of knowledge and skill, like coding. And they're mostly gone.
But, mostly gone isn't the same thing as completely gone. People still enjoy learning these trades for fun. Imagine something like Williamsburg for Silicon Valley 100 years from now. The tour guide will explain how people used to write programs. The guests will ooh and aah that people could ever have done such sophisticated tasks. Maybe one of the guests will be intrigued and learn the coding craft.
This has been going on for millennia. The only reason you're scared now is because there are fewer and fewer crafts that can't be automated, and we've built an economic system around scarcity, especially the scarcity of labor. We know from history when such tectonic shifts happen its very disruptive to civilization. Stability is lost and wars are fought. I believe that's what you actually fear, and not AI per se. You fear the change that comes with AI.
On a positive note, you're alive at what will likely be one of the greatest inflection points in human history! How lucky is that?!
That remains to be seen. Not all inflection points are good things. If we're at a major inflection point with generative AI (and I doubt that we are), it's possible that will end up being a bad thing, not a good one.
I'm not saying that this tech will end up being good or bad on the whole, I'm saying that it's far too soon to be able to predict that.
I do agree, though, that it's not the technology itself that presents risk, it's people developing and using it that could go very very wrong.
Even with the rapid rise of AI, I think we will be stuck at this stage for quite a while. Yes, AI will be able to made a button for your app or make your app completely, but what people always want is greater control. Someone needs to be making business decisions about how things work and interact, or how things are architected for anticipated load. So a lot of easy and repetitive work goes away but demand shifts to more deep tech engineers and more business/design engineers.
That, and when people have expressed their natural fear that genAI and LLMs will adversely impact their abililty to make a living, a common response -- especially early on when the fear was much higher -- from the pro-AI crowd is (paraphrasing) "too bad, you can't stop progress". That's not a reasonable response, and it's one that effectively says "you don't matter, sucks to be you." It's not far from saying "AI is your enemy."